One of the most controversial aspects of the secretly negotiated Trans Pacific Partnership is its inclusion of investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS) — a procedure that allows a corporation to sue governments to get rid of laws that undermine its profitability. ISDSs epitomize everything that’s messed up in “trade” agreements, have resulted in corporations being given billions of dollars in tax-payer money in “compensation” for environmental, safety and labor laws; and, most notoriously, were used by Philip Morris to attack countries that passed laws aimed at reducing smoking.

TPP’s proponents (including lead US negotiator, a former Citibank exec named Michael Froman) claim that its ISDS procedures are different, but as David Dayen points out, they’re virtually word-identical to widely abused ISDSs in trade agreements like CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

But TPP’s ISDS system is much worse than its predecessors in one way: it includes finance as one of the industries that can attack government regulation through the courts. Under TPP’s ISDS system, the big banks would be able to block attempts to separate out investment and retail banking (the merger of these two types of banking led directly to the financial crisis of 2008) or even to make them account and pay for the systemic risk they impose on the whole world’s financial system through risky, mass-scale, leveraged gambling.One of the most controversial aspects of the secretly negotiated Trans Pacific Partnership is its inclusion of investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS) — a procedure that allows a corporation to sue governments to get rid of laws that undermine its profitability. ISDSs epitomize everything that’s messed up in “trade” agreements, have resulted in corporations being given billions of dollars in tax-payer money in “compensation” for environmental, safety and labor laws; and, most notoriously, were used by Philip Morris to attack countries that passed laws aimed at reducing smoking.

TPP’s proponents (including lead US negotiator, a former Citibank exec named Michael Froman) claim that its ISDS procedures are different, but as David Dayen points out, they’re virtually word-identical to widely abused ISDSs in trade agreements like CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

But TPP’s ISDS system is much worse than its predecessors in one way: it includes finance as one of the industries that can attack government regulation through the courts. Under TPP’s ISDS system, the big banks would be able to block attempts to separate out investment and retail banking (the merger of these two types of banking led directly to the financial crisis of 2008) or even to make them account and pay for the systemic risk they impose on the whole world’s financial system through risky, mass-scale, leveraged gambling.